Editorial: Rush to school reform likely to get it wrong

1:53 PM, November 20, 2012

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Lame-duck legislative sessions are typically the devil’s cauldron, filled with a steaming heap of cowardly and ill-thought-out legislation that wouldn’t have a prayer of passing if citizens (or even lawmakers) were paying much attention.

This year is no different, with the Republican majorities in both chambers weighing serious, sweeping structural changes to public education in a hurried and haphazard fashion. Certainly, the goal of this sloppy legislation isn’t to improve schooling (you’d need a far more careful approach to do that) so what’s the motive? Likely, it’s ideology — which is often the enemy of improved outcomes.

Everyone should be wary of the fact that these new ideas have been forged by Lansing lawyer Richard McLellan, a former official in the administration of Gov. John Engler and the cofounder of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, who has long been a proponent of a voucher system, which would send public money to private schools.

Gov. Rick Snyder asked McLellan — whose job is running the Oxford Foundation, which aims to “lessen the burdens of government” — to oversee the rethink of public school funding in the state.

There’s no question that Michigan could use more innovation in education, and open minds about school finance and governance are going to be a prerequisite in the ongoing conversation about change. But in a host of bills that hadn’t seen the light of day until after the Nov. 6 election, the Legislature is poised to ram through reforms that really ought to be discussed and debated in a much broader context, and probably over a much longer period of time.

And much of what’s being proposed looks a lot like McLellan’s voucher system, just by another name.

The legislation being debated would essentially open up the state to creation of an unlimited number of schools run by for-profit charter outfits, businesses, universities and just about anyone else, with the use of money that now funds public school districts. Even the newly created Education Achievement Authority, which debuted this year as a special district for chronically low-performing schools, would gain sweeping power to create new schools under one of the bills being considered.

The idea behind them is principally to introduce more market competition for public schools, and to allow for more innovation.

Neither is a bad idea.

But, as crafted, these bills would not have these new schools face the kind of oversight — standard-setting and enforcement — that the state has been inching toward implementing for other public schools.

This has been a running problem with the efforts to expand charter schools since Snyder was elected in 2010; advocates believe the market for independent schools is self-regulating, and that bad charters will close because Michigan families won’t choose them.

The problem is that, in practice, that hasn’t happened in the most robust charter market in the state, Detroit, where scores of middling or even awful charters stay open year after year, providing no better education than their public school counterparts.

And in other districts, including those where state authorities have decided to pursue the idea of turning all the schools over to charter operators, Michigan has been unable to attract the ones with national reputations for quality.

The bills under consideration in Lansing also don’t address the broad financial implications for existing public schools, who could see their per-pupil funding dip substantially with the creation of the new schools.

Again, there’s nothing wrong with the idea of competition. And the public school landscape in Michigan is badly in need of continued reform; to the extent that competition can help push that reform along, it should be welcome.

But it’s about how you implement it — and whether you degrade what the state already has, in many cases, in favor of new, untested and unaccountable alternatives.

Competition isn’t a panacea, and Michigan’s indulgence of mediocre or awful schools whose only virtue is that they call themselves charters is not a path to success.

This is just not something Michigan needs to leap into in a lame-duck session.
Leadership needs to back off, take some time, entertain a full-throated debate about these ideas, their motives, opportunities and challenges, and only then vote whether to embrace them.